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Arnhem, Netherlands, 2019. Two drug dealers get a tip from a colleague: there's a new bar in town where the manager is specifically interested in cocaine. Cash buyer, no questions asked. They drive over with nine hundred grams of cocaine in a backpack. Th
They planned the perfect crime. They failed spectacularly.
Dumb Crimes Europe tells the funniest, most absurd true crime stories from across the continent , from the burglar who forgot to log out of Facebook on the victim's computer, to the five tonnes of Nutella that vanished from a German town called Bad Field.
No murders. No violence. Just the purest stupidity European criminals have to offer, delivered with the deadpan seriousness it deserves.
New episodes every Monday.
This is Dumb Crimes Europe. I'm Kit Barlow.
Speaker 2:And this week, two drug dealers walked into a bar in The Netherlands to sell drugs, and the entire bar stood up and arrested them.
Speaker 1:Arnhem, Eastern Netherlands, late two thousand nineteen. A small commercial street in a perfectly ordinary part of the city. A bar on the Ground Floor of an unmarked building, brown wooden interior, standard tables, standard chairs, a bartender behind the counter, about 15 people inside drinking quietly from the street, entirely indistinguishable from the other 700 other bars in Gelderland.
Speaker 2:This was not a bar.
Speaker 1:It was not a bar. It was the dealers would discover within approximately forty seconds of entering a tactical training facility operated by the Dutch Polisi used for, among other things, scenario training in undercover operations and crowd control drills. The wooden interior was a set. The 15 people drinking were officers. The bartender was a sergeant.
Speaker 2:How did the dealers find it?
Speaker 1:Through a tip from a colleague who had heard from a man at a barbecue that there was a new bar in Arnhem where the manager was specifically interested in cocaine and that the manager was prepared to buy a substantial quantity in person in cash with no questions asked. The dealers, two men in their late 20s with a previous track record of sales in the region, took the tip seriously. They arranged the meeting. They drove to the address. They parked outside.
Speaker 2:Did they think anything was strange?
Speaker 1:They did not. From the outside, the building looked like a bar. The sign said it was a bar. The lights were dim like a bar. The street outside had ordinary parked cars, ordin bins, ordinary lampposts.
Speaker 1:There was, in their assessment, nothing unusual about it. So they entered with a backpack containing, the police later confirmed, approximately 900 grams of cocaine wrapped in cellophane inside three plastic bags.
Speaker 2:They walked in. They walked in.
Speaker 1:The door closed behind them. The bartender looked up, said in Dutch, they responded. They walked to the counter. They ordered two beers. The bartender served two beers.
Speaker 1:They drank. They waited for the manager.
Speaker 2:They sat in the bar.
Speaker 1:They sat in the bar for approximately twelve minutes, drinking lager surrounded by what appeared to be ordinary patrons discussing between themselves the price they were going to ask. They had agreed on the way over to ask for €32,000. They were planning to settle at 28,000. The manager, they had been told, was new to the trade and unlikely to negotiate aggressively.
Speaker 2:This conversation took place.
Speaker 1:This conversation took place audibly in a bar surrounded by approximately 15 people, none of whom appeared to be paying any attention, all of whom were in fact listening with professional interest. The bartender brought them a second round of beers. They thanked them. They continued planning.
Speaker 2:When did the manager arrive? He did not arrive.
Speaker 1:There was no manager. The next thing that happened was that one of the men sitting at a table near the window stood up, walked over to where the dealers were sitting at the bar, pulled the badge badge from his jacket, and said in Dutch, Polisi Arnim, you're under arrest.
Speaker 2:One man.
Speaker 1:One man. The dealers froze. They looked at the man with the badge. They looked at each other. One of them began to reach for the back of his waistband where the police later established he had a small folding knife.
Speaker 1:He did not get the knife out. What happened? Every other person in the bar stood up at the same time. 15 of them from every table from the barstools from the booths along the back wall, including the bartender who had stepped out from behind the bar. They all had police badges.
Speaker 1:Several of them had drawn sidearms. The dealers were at that moment, the only two people in the room who were not police officers.
Speaker 2:They were surrounded.
Speaker 1:They were entirely surrounded by a uniformed and plainclothes mix of approximately 15 Dutch police in what had appeared until that exact moment to be a normal Dutch bar. The dealers, both of whom had been drinking lager and discussing prices for twelve minutes, found themselves abruptly aware that they had not been in a bar.
Speaker 2:One of them began to laugh.
Speaker 1:According to the arrest report, yes. One of the suspects, and what officers described as a moment of acute surrender, began to laugh. He sat down on the barstool. He raised his hands. He said in Dutch, of course.
Speaker 1:Of course it is.
Speaker 2:He understood.
Speaker 1:He understood. The other suspect did not laugh. The other suspect attempted briefly to make a run for the door. He made it approximately four meters before being intercepted by two of the officers, neither of whom had been particularly close to him at the moment he started running, but all of whom had been, throughout the entire twelve minutes, entirely positioned to do exactly this.
Speaker 2:They were caught.
Speaker 1:They were caught. The backpack was confiscated. The cocaine was photographed. Both men were arrested. The bar was, immediately afterwards, restored to its normal use as a training facility, although the suspects later described their experience of having a beer there as quite pleasant.
Speaker 2:How did the police set this up?
Speaker 1:This is the part of the story that I find quite reassuring about Dutch institutional planning. The police had for several years been running what they internally called the bar scenario, a controlled environment in which an undercover officer would, through a chain of intermediaries, make himself known to local dealers as a willing buyer. The scenarios had been used several times over a period of about three years. They had a near perfect arrest rate because by the time the dealers walked into the bar, the entire chain of communication had been built specifically to deliver them there. The bar was the trap.
Speaker 1:The lead was debate. The colleague who told them about the manager? Was almost certainly also a police asset or had been told the lead by an asset. The chain went back several hops. By the time the suspects had heard about the new bar, the new bar had been set up specifically for them.
Speaker 1:They had been on a guided rail since the moment they took the tip seriously.
Speaker 2:They were, in a sense, expected.
Speaker 1:They were, in a sense, expected. The bartender knew their order before they walked in. The 15 patrons knew their faces. The two beers had been pulled by an officer who had spent the morning rehearsing. The cocaine, for legal reasons, had to be brought all the way into the bar by the suspects themselves.
Speaker 1:The script was tight.
Speaker 2:The trial.
Speaker 1:The Recht Bank Gelderland, convicted under the Dutch Opium Act for possession with intent to distribute. The cocaine, the conversations, the recording from the interior of the bar, the approach from the front door, all of it was admissible. The defense had nothing to dispute. The sentence was within the standard range.
Speaker 2:What's the lesson here?
Speaker 1:Several. First, if a colleague tells you that there is a brand new bar where the manager is specifically interested in cocaine, the manager is the police, without exception. Real bar managers do not advertise themselves as drug friendly to strangers at barbecues. Second, if you walk into a bar and every patron is silent and looking slightly past you, you are not in a bar. You are in a slightly different kind of room.
Speaker 1:Third, if you drink in that room for twelve minutes, you have been recorded for twelve minutes. The Dutch police have learned to wait. And fourth, when an entire bar stands up at the same moment, the joke is over. Laugh, sit down, raise your hands. The Dutch are extremely organized and the next twelve minutes belong to them.
Speaker 2:That's Dumb Crimes Europe.
Speaker 1:Where the bars are tactical, the patrons are armed, and the logger is admissible. I'm Kit Barlow.
Speaker 2:See you next week.